In German Approach, a Dilemma of Distance

By JOHN VINOCUR
Politicus
International Herald Tribune
July 3, 2007

BERLIN

The president of Estonia, Toomas Hendrik Ilves, complained recently to a German newspaper that there were European Union countries that have gone "much too far in their appeasement policy toward Russia." He wasn't referring to Malta or Luxembourg.

Vaclav Klaus, the president of the Czech Republic, was asked shortly afterward by another reporter how he reacted to Social Democratic leaders here calling for a policy of German equidistance between the United States and Russia. He was more direct, using words like "incomprehensible" and "irrational."

In truth, said Klaus, the call for a German place between two increasingly less compatible worlds, "pointed to certain ambitions in Germany."

Re-enter an emboldened Ilves, who met with George W. Bush in Washington last week - perhaps to prep him for his meetings in Kennebunkport, Maine, with Vladimir Putin - and took the German-Russian issue a step further.

Directly addressing the Germans, he brushed aside the Christian Democrat-Social Democrat grand coalition's much publicized grievances with Poland as subordinate ones, and said the basic truth was that the Poles can't "feel completely certain that they won't be sold down the river to Russia in some dubious bargain."

The remarks address a problem for the EU, and NATO, and all of Germany's friends.

They applaud that Angela Merkel has in many ways pulled her country back from Gerhard Schröder's attempt with Putin and Jacques Chirac to reconfigure Europe into a counterweight in opposition to America.

But they also listen, sometimes nodding in agreement, to their Eastern and Central Europe partners' doubts about a contradictory trend.

Here are the friends' concerns:

Vocal parts of the old Soviet bloc truly do not trust Germany and what they see as its ambiguous or complaisant relationship with Russia.

The Left, a new party born last month, grouping old Communists from East Germany and hard-left elements from Social Democratic ranks, will again push anti-Americanism and a kind of recurring neutralist reflex in Germany into the center of the country's political debate.

These developments can only encourage Russia, through its hold on European energy supplies and opposition to the deployment of parts of an American missile defense base in Poland and the Czech Republic, to work toward weakening both the trans-Atlantic relationship and Europe's still unrealized unity.

The circumstances are exceptionally awkward.

On the one hand, the coalition government let pass virtually without a murmur of contradiction the statement by Peter Stuck, chairman of the Social Democrats' parliamentary group, that Germany should have "the same proximity" to the United States and Russia - a challenge to the country's westbindung, or the unquestionable anchorage in the Western world that has been the basis of its successful foreign policy since Konrad Adenauer.

On the other hand, the range for a strong push back by Merkel is limited by what some leading Christian Democrats, who acknowledge the problem, say is her concern to keep the coalition intact until a politically propitious moment before elections scheduled in 2009. Add to this the Bush administration's meager standing in much of the country, and an overcautious German reflex to avoid any trace of confrontation with Russia. (Especially in comparison with the German readiness for jumping on whoever is in charge in America, be it Jimmy Carter or Ronald Reagan.)

Gerd Koenen, a political scientist, describes the circumstances as part of Germany's "Russia Complex," a historical alternation of fascination and repulsion. It is also the title of his book that won the Prize for European Understanding at the Leipzig Book Fair this spring for its look at the relationship over much of the last century.

On receiving the prize, Koenen offered what was a kind of updated postscript. He warned about current German instincts and delusions concerning Russia, and said that Putin, like Lenin and Stalin, had again made Germany an object of Russia's "refreshed world ambitions."

In getting to that caution, Koenen makes some rather sharp observations about recent Germany susceptibilities in relation to Russia in his book.

He argues that in the 1970s and 1980s West German détente advocates actually showed readiness to have West Germany function as a "secondary guarantor of the status quo right up to the edges of the Brezhnev Doctrine" (the Soviet assertion of its right to intervene in the affairs of its satellites) in relation to human rights movements in Poland, Czechoslovakia and East Germany.

Now, talking in his office in Frankfurt, Koenen described the policy of the Merkel government as one concerned with doing nothing to antagonize the Russians - or, in his words, "maintaining a link even at the expense of raising false expectations" about what the relationship could bring.

As for the call for German equidistance between Russia and America, Koenen said, "people in Eastern Europe are alarmed by the statement. And they're right."

Still, Koenen felt Germany was too much bound into the networks of the West to ever move into a dangerously equivocal zone. He said, "If it came to spelling things out, Peter Stuck could never show anybody how this equidistance policy would work. I continue to believe Germans respond to facts on the ground."

But many of those facts on the ground point in an uncertain direction.

On a major scale, while enjoying a privileged relationship with Russia on energy, Merkel's Germany, which held the presidency of the EU for the past six months, made no apparent effort to press Putin toward an Energy Charter that would limit his leverage in using its supply as a political weapon. German business leaders, with major investment in Russia, are hardly crying out for one.

So: A special German path into the future? Merkel has scorned the use of the phrase that evokes images of a headstrong and dominating Germany.

Yet talk about German equidistance between the Americans and Russians is exactly akin when it comes from within the Berlin coalition and is not crushed by the chancellor.

For the countries of the old Soviet orbit, which regard America as sole protector against a Russian drive to reset limits on their sovereignty, both the remark and the subsequent silence could not be heard another way.

With less emotion, more caution and an effort at constraint, that goes as well for some of Germany's other friends.